The technological side of Email has always occupied a bittersweet corner in my nerdy heart. In this article I dive a bit in the history of SMTP and share a simple but effective solution that I currently use to rationalise system and users' email delivery for a few of the Linux systems I manage. Read more...

In a previous article I described how to develop a serverless event-driven application to automate social media updates. Now I show how to make use of RSS/Atom Feed and AWS Lambda + CDK to add the missing bit and make it 100% automated. Read more...

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. ― Bruce Lee Read more...

For my reading habits in the recent years I've been using p2k.co service to send Pocket articles to my Kindle. I decided to fix some of p2k shortcomings replacing it with an event-driven serverless application built with AWS Lambda, Fargate and CDK Read more...

Moving from a previous CDK article I expand the publish-to-social code base to add a nice report functionality. In this article I show you how easy it is to introduce Lambda Destinations in your CDK project and make use of them for this particular use case. For the frontend part I use Svelte web framework to present the Lambda report JSON output as web page content. Read more...

With CDK is easy to organize AWS resources and share them between Stacks when needed. In this article I show you how I split an `api` Lambda in two, one for handling the API Gateway requests and the other for sending messages to an external notifications service. Read more...

In the previous article I introduced AWS Cloud Developer Kit and wondered if and how to make use of code abstractions when designing IaC. Today I show you one way to extend the previous codebase and deploy a typical event driven (pub-sub) serverless application built with Lambda and SNS. Read more...

After successfully replacing Terraform with CDK in a real life project I take the chance to wrap up the new knowledge along with some Terraform vs. CDK kind of considerations. I also synthesize the acquired know-how in a mini tutorial based on the actual code used in the production scenario. Read more...

For a while I wanted to manage my CV in a more flexible way. I stumbled upon a great article on CSS-Tricks that made me think I had no more excuses to procrastinate. In this article I present my solution along with some considerations. Read more...

A wrap up of my last 20 years as a professional in IT, along with some considerations about the current state of the art. Read more...

Since I discovered the main concepts and benefits of Serverless applications, I’m gradually migrating the few services I run on my personal server(s) towards solutions which require no need for me to keep any (virtual) server running. The reason is simple: there are so many other interesting things to do than keeping an online system in good shape. If that’s not enough, leveraging FaaS (at least for very small workloads) usually brings cheaper bills compared to traditional hosting. Read more...

It’s been a while since I last updated the blog, to the point I almost forgot where it was hosted… The full story is that at some point in time I felt like to share some techical content which couldn’t fit into a tweet. I eventually landed on Tumblr, mainly because of the native Markdown support, but I was never really satisfied with it: I needed none of its social features, even less its ads, and I wanted to have a proper HTTPS URL not ending in tumblr.com. Read more...

After ~10 years of experience in managing servers at small and medium scales, and despite the fact that I still love doing sysadmin stuff and I constantly try to learn new and better ways to approach and solve problems, there’s one thing that I think I’ve learned very well: it’s hard to get the operation part right, very hard. Read more...

It seems that recently every OSS tool I’ve been using during my working day (together with many other cool projects) is written in Go, so I decided to teach myself a little bit of it having fun in the meanwhile, in the not-too-rare case I’ll need to troubleshoot one of them, or simply understand better how it works. Unsurprisingly enough, the Net is full of excellent documentation material if you want to dig into Go programming without spending a single cent. Read more...

Berlin winter is famous to be quite cold (ok, let’s be honest, I’m a tech addict and can’t help the urge of hack around from time to time) so recently I’ve spent some fun time tinkering a bit with this Internet Of Things idea: how to make my flat a little bit more automated and have fun while adding this competely superfluous automation? Read more...